Newton himself predicted the oblateness as
confirmed by an intensive surveying expedition
led by Maupertuis in the 1740's. The mathematics
of self-gravitating spinning liquid masses in
equilibrium was developed further by Maclaurin in
the eighteenth century, Jacobi and Poincaré
in the nineteenth century and “Black Hole" Chandrasekhar, N. Lebovitz and R. A. Lyttleton in the twentieth century [1]}, [2]}. Jacobi predicted that at a high rotation rate,
the branch of oblate spheroids would bifurcate, and
the stable shape is then a triaxial ellipsoid. The dwarf planet Haumea is a Jacobi ellipsoid with the three axes being roughly 2300 km, 1700 km and 1000 km.
